SEMINARIILE DE CERCETARE ALE I.F.P.A.R. (16.03.2023)
victorg, Monday 13 March 2023 - 00:00:00 //



Joi, 16 martie 2023, orele 12–14
Conferențiar: CYRIL MCDONNELL (National University of Ireland, Maynooth)
Tema:  „Kierkegaard’s Existential Approach to Ontology and the Concept of Authenticity”
Linkul pentru accesul online:
https://meet.google.com/idm-boup-spy


For Kierkegaard, human existence is lived out in one of three distinct and unrelated levels, or stages, or spheres, or plains which he famously categorises as: the aesthetic level, the ethical level, and the religious level. In Kierkegaard’s account, there is the possibility of obtaining authentic individual human existence but only at the religious level of existence, a position he arrives at through doing ontology from an existential approach. Kierkegaard’s concept of authenticity, therefore, can only be properly understood and appreciated as a consequence of his existential ontology, and not from the caricature presentation of that concept which we find popularised in the twentieth century by such atheistic thinkers as Albert Camus, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Martin Heidegger, all of whom took Kierkegaard’s name and some of his central concepts in vain, but not in substance, in their elaborations of their philosophies of existence and authenticity; or, at least, so I would like to argue in this paper.
In this presentation, therefore, I will first sketch some of the most salient features of Kierkegaard’s existential approach to ontology, comparing it briefly to others en passant, such as Husserl, Sartre, and Heidegger, before then outlining the trajectory of the three stages of existence which culminates, for sound philosophical and religious reasons, in the concept of authentic individual human existence that only makes sense in the religious stage of existence.